Eating Chocolate to Stay Slim?
March 27, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
March 28, 2012
Time
By Alice Park
“Thank God chocolate is healthy. But NOT Hershey’s.” –KTRN
When it comes to chocolate, you might just be able to have your sweet and eat it, too.
That’s what researchers report in the first study to balance all of the known health benefits and harms of chocolate. Publishing in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. Beatrice Golomb and her colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, say that the sweet’s extra calories may be more than offset by its positive effect on other conditions, such as heart disease, blood pressure and glucose control.
Most notably, the team found that people who reported eating chocolate more frequently were thinner than those who ate less, as measured by their body mass index (BMI). Golomb says that based on previous studies documenting the health benefits of chocolate, she expected that these metabolic benefits might, at best, compensate for the extra calories. “I wasn’t expecting that BMI would be favorable,” says Golomb. “That was a nice surprise.”
Golomb’s team asked 1,000 men and women how much chocolate they consumed in a week, and recorded how much exercise they did over the same time period. Eating chocolate five times a week was linked to a 1-point drop in BMI, though the amount of chocolate the participants ate did not seem to have a significant effect on weight. The chocolate-lovers’ lower BMI also could not be accounted for by exercise or eating less overall. It “clearly wasn’t explained by the fact that people who ate chocolate ate less food, because they ate more. And they didn’t exercise more than those who didn’t eat as much chocolate,” says Golomb. “So there is no evidence that this effect can be explained by any confounder we looked at.”
